There’s no shortage of “Sh*t People Say” videos out there. An internet, web video meme started December 12th with “Sh*t Girls Say” as a play on the now-legendary Twitter account “Sh*t My Dad Says”, the series of videos features ordinary people making statements by a particular group of people that is typically heard by that group of people. As you can imagine, some of the videos have been off-color to politically incorrect to downright racist. They have gained popularity mostly because they’re unapologetic in their observations of people and human nature.

Below is one dedicated to Event Planners. I highlighted this video, however, not because it was for and by Event Planners (our colleagues in events) but because there’s a good lesson here in video marketing.

The main phenomenon about the “Sh*t People Say” videos is how quickly they go viral (even the ones that are only mildly funny have millions of views). This is not due to the creative and marketing genius of the video creators, rather, the title of the videos wherein people must place “Sh*t _____ Say” in the title aggregates all of these similarly themed videos into one impromptu, informal channel. When you click on one video, YouTube displays dozens more like it in the sidebar. If you’ve watched one (even if you didn’t like it), chances are you couldn’t resist clicking on at least one of the other videos (“Sh*t Cats Say” anyone?).

Back to our event planners video.  While the video was good, in over three weeks it has only received 1,000 hits. Why is that?  The title. In an effort to be polite and business-like, they titled their YouTube video “Stuff Event Planners Say”). This might be a clean title but YouTube doesn’t understand this as being part of the “Sh*t People Say” series. So the videos YouTube suggests on the video page are anything but “Sh*t People Say” videos. This means these fun Event Planners who created this video for the world to see are not being sent the mega-traffic from the other “Sh*t People Say” videos (millions of people).

The lesson here is invaluable. We often suggest taking advantage of any viral video trend that organically fits in with an event’s message and agenda. To do this, you must play by the rules already established by the original viral video whether doing commentary on or a spoof of the video, keep it simple and don’t deviate from the elements that made the video popular to begin with. In this case, while being respectful, proper and unoffensive is a good thing that I personally can appreciate, it also goes against everything that makes the “Sh*t People Say” videos a viral sensation.  Unfortunately, by playing it safe and changing the rules of the viral video meme (even a small change amounting to a 4-letter word) this video lost out on valuable marketing juice.

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Related articles

• Watch The 9 Most Popular Viral Videos Of The Week (huffingtonpost.com)
• Site Archives All ‘Sh*t People Say’ Videos [SORRY] (mashable.com)
• 15 Best ‘Sh*t People Say’ Videos (mashable.com)